Polyurethane V Roller

Situation:

A major pipe manufacturer was experiencing frequent failures and shortened life cycle of polyurethane v rollers used in the processing of pipe. When these failures occurred, manufacturing was interrupted while a new polyurethane v roller was put into place. The customer wanted to minimize or shorten the downtime as significant resources were being applied to the replacement. This resulted in high maintenance costs and loss of revenues due to downtime.The customer needed a reliable domestic source to decrease cost of replacement parts and to provide the parts quickly.

Solution:

The engineered solution involved a deeper understanding of the failure rate of the polyurethane v roller. Once the failure mode was fully understood, a polymer was identified that had greater dynamic properties, thus offering significantly longer product life cycle. During the investigation of the situation it became acutely obvious that the failure mode was very similar to that encountered with many cart applications.

Result:

The benefit for this customer was actually two pronged; first, Conveyor Concepts in conjunction with Reaction Industries developed a process to re-manufacture and recover existing failed rollers. This was a significant savings to the customer as the failed part was expensive. Upon recovering the shaft from the failed part, the new polyurethane v roller was applied. Second, the new polyurethane product far exceeded the dynamic properties of the failed material. This increased life cycle and decreased down time for the pipe manufacture. The ROI for the project was estimated to be well over 100% during the first twelve months of the product development. The Conveyor Concepts team is continuing to look for ways to further prolong the life the polyurethane v rollers and thus return more cost savings to the operation.